Germany's Ivy League

What is a university of the calibre of Oxford or Harvard worth? Germany reckons a cool €1.9 billion, but what has this money achieved?

GERMANY has long been a science powerhouse, quietly turning out high-quality research without any headline-grabbing institutions like Oxbridge or the Ivy League. Then, in 2005, the government decided to change this, and set up the Excellence Initiative (EI). Putting aside ideals of equality, and with €1.9 billion behind it, the EI set out to sort the wheat from the chaff, or rather the country's excellent institutions from the merely good.

"Germany always had an ideal that every university was equal," says Beate Konze-Thomas, head of programmes and infrastructure at the German Research Foundation (DFG). "But for several reasons, not least the money, it is just impossible to have 130 brilliant universities."

The five-year programme, funded by the DFG and the German Council of Science and Humanities, aimed to find the best institutions and make them better. The start of the initiative prompted intense competition, with international peer review panels judging each university's proposal for funds based on plans to support the best research, expand opportunities for young researchers, foster interdisciplinary research and increase levels of collaboration.

In total, 39 graduate schools and 37 "Clusters of Excellence" across 30 universities were selected to each receive €1 million and €6.5 million a year respectively. Nine of these universities' plans were ambitious enough for them to receive the accolade of "elite" status, and the promise of an additional €68 million each over five years.

Increased funding has helped create an estimated 4000 new research jobs in these institutions, as well as the provision of up-to-date equipment and higher salaries. But the greatest effect has been on the institutes' international standing, says Bernd Huber, president of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, which received €33 million. "If I go to the US or Japan, everybody knows about this Excellence Initiative," he says.

Institutes labelled as "elite" have also been more successful in attracting additional funding from regional governments and the European Union, says Konze-Thomas. And while the DFG stresses that it will take a decade for a handful of institutions to emerge as the best, overall standards are improving. In the 2010 QS World University Rankings all but six German institutions improved on their 2009 positions, and German universities in the top 200 gained an average of 20 places.

Status symbol

While the heads of the institutions see the EI as the biggest shake-up in 20 years, the effect on the ground has not always been so noticeable. "We are seen as a university of excellence, but it's more about status than anything," says Diego Reyes, a Colombian PhD student at the University of Freiburg, one of the "elite" institutions. "Most of what I know of the initiative comes from Wikipedia."

But the shake-up has allowed some graduate schools and excellence clusters to try out new ways of working. For example, the Aachen Institute for Advanced Studies in Computational Engineering Science (AICES) gives junior academics greater independence by making sure their research groups are associated with no single professor, and that they sit outside the usual university structure.

Clusters also allow researchers to approach a problem from new angles. "We've built a completely new infrastructure rather than being restricted to the traditional departments," says Matthias Drieß, coordinator of the cluster of excellence in catalysis at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB). "Senior and junior scientists perform joint research across six disciplines. There's an atmosphere of creativity."

The TUB cluster involves three Berlin universities, a Fraunhofer centre, two Max Planck Institutes and the chemical company BASF, which has contributed €8 million to the project. Almost half of the EI-funded projects bring together at least two research institutes, fostering greater collaboration between the country's many research bodies, something that hasn't always proved easy.

The initiatives have also tackled German academia's age-old problem of the near endless doctorate by providing more supervisors, imposing time limits on PhDs and convening thesis committees. Other problems still remain, however. The number of female researchers remains low, despite targeted recruitment drives.

Tenured positions remain few and far between, making job security a problem for young researchers, says Reinhard Jahn, who is now director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. "I went through this myself when my five-year contract at a Max Planck Institute was terminated," he says. "In the end I went to Yale University and stayed for six years." Luckily for Germany, Jahn returned a fully fledged professor, but not every researcher who leaves the country returns. With its cash injection, the EI hopes to entice back more émigrés.

Foreign researchers are also a target, and here the EI investment seems to be paying off. Surveys by the DFG show that 12 per cent of professors in the newly created positions come from abroad, as do 25 per cent of junior or assistant professors and a third of doctoral students in the new positions.

But language remains a barrier, especially to long-term prospects, says David Kellen, a Portuguese psychology postdoc at the University of Freiburg. "It's almost impossible to get tenure without teaching, and that means speaking German," he says. "The system will spit me out eventually."

The situation is changing as courses are increasingly taught in English, says Marek Behr, a computational engineer at AICES. "In Germany, of course the daily language is German, but this is something universities are addressing to create multilingual environments."

Winners and losers

An extension of the EI to a second €2.7 billion phase, running from 2012 to 2017, has been warmly welcomed by universities and research institutes alike. Yet the system is far from perfect. A competitive process that occupies entire universities with paperwork every five years cannot continue forever, says Huber. "Maybe after a third round some stabilisation must occur."

Huber has another suggestion. Universities are primarily funded by state governments, he says, but based on the initiative, the federal government should choose some institutes to back permanently. "In my view, the government needs to create federal universities which receive sufficient funding to be competitive on an international basis."

Groups that fund research warn that concentrating on successful subject areas risks smothering other spots of brilliance. "The chances of small units getting excellence funding are decreasing, and I think this will change the university landscape," says Enno Aufderheide, secretary general of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, one of Germany' long-standing research institutions. "Right now it is OK, but you have to be careful to maintain balance and diversity."

It also has not gone unnoticed that tighter financial times can encourage a focus on elite institutions. Many countries are emulating Germany, says Konze-Thomas. "The first decisions for a similar initiative have already been taken in Spain, Israel and in Japan," she says.

While the wedge driven between the haves and have-nots remains unpopular with some, the DFG is unapologetic. "If you look at the map of EI sites in Germany you see a lot of white spaces - universities that did not receive anything," says Konze-Thomas. "They think they will disappear from the map of quality in research totally, but if you have a competition, you have winners and losers."

For the country as a whole, however, the EI seems to be working, says Alec Wodtke, a physical chemist from the US now at the University of Göttingen. "China is coming on strong, but I think Germany is probably the best country in the world to be a scientist right now."

Where to go

The strength of Germany is its differentiated research, says Enno Aufderheide, secretary general of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. It's easy to find a place that has a special mission that resonates with your interest, both in a subject and a way to do research, he says. "Industrial or applied science favour Fraunhofer and Leibniz institutes. If you like individual research, go to a Max Planck institute. If you want to teach, go to a university, and if you want to work in a large collaboration and be a part of an intimately connected network, go to a Helmholtz centre."

Elizabeth Gibney is a reporter for Research Europe, based in London

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